Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Frequent readers of the blog know I’m retired from a little
west coast startup named Intel.(Yea,
that Intel.)All this flap over privacy
cracks me up.Let’s go back to “the old
days” of 1999.Intel had just come up
with a great technology for the “new” Pentium III processor.Each chip would have (basically) a serial
number.This would be a great boon to
large companies for the management of computer assets.The IT Department could do all sorts of things
to keep the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) down, manage the software on each
computer, target updates to specific machines and streamline troubleshooting
problems.Only problem was that every
chip, not just the ones in large companies, would have the serial number
(identifier).Conspiracy theorists went
nuts and claimed “Big Brother” had arrived and everything you did would be
subject to being tracked. Intel backed away from including the ID'r code.Scott McNealy,
then CEO of Sun Microsystems, was asked by a reporter (Stephen Manes) to weigh
in about the noise.His quote was (and
remember this was 1999) “You have zero privacy anyway.Get over it.”Things haven’t changed.You have
zero privacy.Every time you make a
phone call, send an email, tweet what you had for lunch, post an instagram, or use
a credit card, someone is gathering information.To see an example of what can be done and why
you have no privacy, hit the “Read More”.

Have you ever heard of the Video Game World Championship?There is such a thing and I had to cover for
a buddy of mine during one.Thankfully
my role was behind the scenes and I didn’t have to attend.My thing was to be the interface between a
big time game company and the “tournament” folks.Intel wanted to show off the latest, hottest
gaming rig they could come up with a not yet released “next” big game.I dealt with the VP of the game company and
the internal Intel folks.What we had at
the show was a special build specifically created for this one purpose.How did I know that?It had our internal guy’s name and cell phone
number in the upper right corner of the screen.Nice!Well, someone attending the
tournament videotaped (over the shoulder of the person playing) the screen as
the demo of the game was played.He then
posted it on the web for all to see.The
VP of the gaming company came back to me saying Intel had leaked the game and people
were playing it “in the wild”.We went
back and forth and he showed me that it was definitively the Intel build.We (Intel) determined it was a video of the
screen while someone was playing and not a screen capture.The
game company demanded we find out who was the responsible party.Rather than go through a lot of red tape at
Intel, the easiest way for me to track down the culprit was to enlist my son’s
help.He was a Systems Administrator at
a small company.I called him and asked
how I could track the guilty party down.The answer was pretty simple.DOS
had a routine named Trace.All we had to
do was get a copy of the video's IP address on the internet and run a Trace on it.By then there were several repostings of the
video.The Trace routine could track the
address through however many servicers it went through and get back to the
original source.Tracking about three
repostings of the video all lead back to a specific MAC address.(A MAC address is the id of the network interface
adaptor of a computer to the outside world.)From there we tracked down the street address there the computer was
located.With the street address we
found out the address was owned by a doctor and his wife.With the last name we cross referenced the
attendee list of the tournament and matched an attendee to the doctor’s
address.It was the doctor’s son who
attended the show.I gave the kid’s name
and address to the game company’s VP and told him he could pursue it to
whatever extent he wanted.I could
almost hear his jaw hit the floor when heard the amount of data we had been
able to come up with.The trick
is???It was all done within a half hour
by a system administrator at a small company and a peddler from Intel.Not the Intel IT department, not the NSA,
or CIA, or FBI, or other big time cyber sleuths.Just two guys.

Do you have a credit card?It has a magnetic strip on the back of it doesn’t it.You probably wouldn’t believe the amount of
information contained on the little strip.Want to check?Go to one of the
credit card companies offering to consolidate your credit cards.With just a little bit of information from
you, they will come back (instantly – well almost – it’ll be while you’re still
on the website) with every credit card you have and how much you owe on each
one.They’ll ask you to check off which
cards you want to merge onto the new card you’ll be getting from them.

So, anyone shocked by the “news” that the NSA is checking
your phone records must be just crawling out from under a rock somewhere.You want privacy?Get off the grid. Pay for everything cash.Stuff your extra money in your mattress.Don’t own a home.Don’t drive a car.

In other words, the only people with any privacy are those
we all look down on.The bum living in a
tent, panhandling for money has some degree of privacy.The rest of us?Not so much.

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